Background
With a bus fleet of 652, servicing 36.5 million riders a year, DART needed a quick and easy method of communicating between bus operators and supervisors, as well as between different departments, when tracking and managing employee schedules and runs.
Challenges
When operators arrived for their shift, DART employees used a combination of index cards and spreadsheets to record it.
This was stressful and time consuming for both clerks and operators.
“Before OPS-Web, attendance was tracked by having each operator punch a 3x5 card into a time clock and then writing his name and run number on the card. At each bus division, this involved well over 100 operators coming through in a couple of hours at morning pull-out. You can imagine that this was a less than satisfactory solution,” said Steve Meyer, Transportation OPS Analyst, DART.
Furthermore, communication with bus operators and management had to be done in-person or by phone for bidding requests such as vacation time or for disciplinary reasons, which led to miscommunication.
Finally, while the State of Texas does not follow FTA regulations on setting limits on operator working hours, DART still needed an accurate and timely way to track the runs of operators to ensure they did not exceed a certain threshold.